Site Aggregates Corporate Legal Resources

Every year, the nation’s largest law firms produce thousands of client alerts, briefing papers and memoranda on a range of corporate, regulatory and industry issues. What if someone pulled together the links to all these materials and organized them in a way to make them more useful and more readily accessible?

That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind the recently launched site, myCorporateResource.com. The free site aggregates these law firm memoranda, summarizes them and then sorts them by industry, corporate role, area of law and geography. In addition, it provides more than 70 separate RSS feeds for each of these topics to provide notifications of new additions.

Thus, a user of this site could follow only memoranda of interest to members of a corporation’s finance team, only memoranda covering securities law, or only memoranda pertaining to corporate legal issues in Russia.

In addition, other sections of the site highlight the most noteworthy memoranda of the week and the most frequently read articles. A separate SEC section carries virtually everything from and about the agency.

The value this site adds is in its aggregation and sorting of materials scattered over hundreds of law firm Web sites. In an e-mail to me, the site’s founder, Nick Montgomery, explains it this way:

“The problem is that on a stand-alone basis, individual law firms simply do not produce a sufficiently comprehensive range of this material and what they do produce is often not timely from a client’s perspective. However, when one pools the efforts of 100 firms, the result can dramatically change this perspective. All of a sudden, the client has a memo on a given piece of legislation the day it is introduced/adopted or an alert on the relevance of an appellate court ruling the day that it delivered.”

Montgomery points out two other advantages the site offers corporate users — validation and perspective. When the IRS announced a new tax amnesty program for offshore accounts in May, several law firms put out alerts. The site highlighted the ones it considered best but also included links to all the others.

“For the 52,000 terrified holders of offshore accounts at UBS, the ability to get the views of several law firms on the day of the announcement would have considerable advantages to simply reading about it in the WSJ. I would add here that what is interesting about the memos on this subject (like many others) is just how different the alerts actually are and how having them all in one place actually adds some utility.”

Montgomery, a U.S.-educated lawyer, is a former associate in the London office of Weil Gotshal who then became the inhouse corporate and U.S. counsel for one of the firm’s clients. After the company merged with a competitor, Montgomery moved to France and turned his attention to the launch of this site.

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